At some point in the wee small hours of the morning, I woke up. I got the bright idea to go see if I could spot any oil rigs. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out on the balcony.....
....and screamed like a little girl before leaping back into the cabin.
Holy jumpin' dinah!
It.
Was.
COLD.
Not 'oh there's a fresh breeze blowing off the ocean today' cold.
I'm Canadian. I know cold. Okay, I'm a bit of a hothouse flower Canadian but still - I've been to Saskatchewan in the dead of winter (April!
)
I stopped caring about oil rigs at that point. As I crawled back under that wonderful duvet to warm up (sorry 'bout the feet, sweetie!) I did register that it was pretty foggy outside and fell asleep to the faint hope that maybe we wouldn't be able to dock because of the fog....
By the time I woke up again, it was just starting to get light. Not being a complete idiot, I put on shoes & my sweater before going out on the balcony this time. We were just coming into the harbour.
Adding insult to injury, there was no fog, just rain. Cold rain.
So the shorts & t-shirts that we had kept out for the day?
Yeah, they went straight back into our carry-ons (I guess at this point they were 'carry-offs'!)
and we dressed in our jeans & sweatshirts, and wished we had heavier coats with us!
While Dh showered and dressed, I went out to grab some breakfast stuff from the buffet - taking some detours for a few last photos:
Not really all that random, I guess. I'm never quite sure why people always recommend the (now banned!) over the door shoe holders, etc for extra storage. There's four of us in the cabin and there seems to be lots of space for all our stuff. I don't think we travel particularly light so not sure what we're not bringing that we would need extra storage for....?
Once we breakfasted and finished getting ready, it was time for one last sweep of the cabin and (sob) we said goodbye and went down to wait for debarkation. We were....the Daisy Duck group. Because they go by characters you have no idea if that's good or not. Does the Daisy group get called before the Goofy group? Is there any hierarchy? I dunno. But we did have a bit of a wait so Daisy can't be all that important LOL.
It was crowded when we first got down to Deck 3 and we perched in a porthole. As people got off the ship more spaces opened up and we grabbed some chairs in the Promenade Lounge.
The fish-eye lens effect was by accident, not for artistic effect!
Hmm...maybe we weren't Daisy. She's second up in those photos so I'll come back and edit when I figure out who we were. Or I'll just make it up. Whatever's easiest.
As I mentioned, our flight home wasn't till 5:30pm so we weren't in any extreme rush to get off. Our plan for the day was to pick up a rental car and spend a few hours at the Johnson Space Centre (oh sorry, Center) before driving to the airport.
Eventually our character was up and we joined the crowds to leave the ship. As we got down to the luggage area, we ran into our tablemates so got to say goodbye again as Dh went off with a porter in search of our suitcases.
Exiting through Customs was quick and painless and the porter took us straight out and got us a cab. We had booked a car rental with Budget in Texas City - Galveston Enterprise was going to charge an additional $150 drop off fee for a one-way rental to the airport! Um. No thanks.
The taxi to Texas City cost us $50 (tip included) and the rental was booked at $37. I think we ended up paying a bit more because Dh upgraded to an SUV...and we got the all important GPS with it. We should have brought our own GPS but I thought we could just use our phones. But with the phones in airplane mode, we couldn't get GPS to work so live and learn, darnit.
The taxi driver tried to give us directions for getting to the airport. It probably made sense to him but we kind of lost track after about the third turn and decided to just trust the GPS and highway signage.
The rest of the conversation was mostly discussing the weather - they were forecasting SNOW! Yep, holiday's over. Let's go home.
At Budget, we had a bit of a wait for the rental car, as someone else was ahead of us and it's a small rental place - basically a desk inside of the car repair shop at the mall. While we were waiting another family arrived off the ship and we had a 'hey, great minds think alike!' moment LOL.
All in all we were at the Space CentER by 10am. We did some suitcase shuffling in the parking lot - putting stuff from our carry ons into our suitcases, etc. I also made the sad discovery that the batteries in both cameras were dead so all of our photos from then on were just taken with our phones so we missed a lot of good shots
). We have one of the Mexican Baja cruises booked for October and we *thought* we were doing the big reveal a few weeks ago. But then it turned out the kids had figured it out months ago so that was a bit anti-climactic! Darn kids are getting as sneaky as their parents!
